VNTHOMAS

Incognito by David Eagleman

2012-02-11T13:15:00.001-05:00

Incognito by David Eagleman
The secret lives of the brain.

In 1949, Arthur Alberts travelled to villages in West Africa and he recorded some of the most important music ever to come out of Africa. But Alberts ran into social troubles while using the tape recorder. One West African native heard his voice played back and accused Alberts of ‘stealing his tongue’. Albert only narrowly averted being pummeled by taking out a mirror and convincing the man that his tongue was still intact. It’s not difficult to see why the natives found the tape recorder so counterintuitive. A vocalization seems ephemeral and ineffable.

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women’s faces. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of those women were dilated and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Women’s dilated eyes correlates with sexual excitement and readiness. Men’s brain knew this without learning it explicitly. Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. [The pupils of our eyes dilate and grow by almost 3 times when we see someone we are attracted to, or something we are interested in. No wonder candlelight dinners and wine are such a popular choice for a romantic rendezvous. Apart from hiding minor physical flaws and adding a warm glow to your face, the low light setting of candlelight influences our pupil size. The pupils dilate to let in more light into the eye. At the same time, we unconsciously give out the signal that we are interested and attracted to the person across the table. It is the perfect set up to get your point across without saying anything at all. Add wine to the list and it emphasizes your interest. Alcohol not only acts as a social lubricant, but also accentuates pupil dilation.]

you see evidence of this when your foot gets halfway to the brake before you consciously realize a red Toyota is backing out of a driveway on the road ahead of you. You see it when you notice your name spoken in a conversation across the room that you thought you weren’t listening to, when you find someone attractive without knowing why, or when you’re nervous system gives you a ‘hunch’ about which choice you should make. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you or when you are already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring. The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt - “perceived’. But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. Internal data is not generated by external sensory data but merely ’modulated by it. The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes ‘anchors’ the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world.

Vision usually dominates over hearing, but a counter example is the illusory flash effect: when a flash effect: when a flashed spot is accompanied by two beeps, it appears to flash twice. This is related to another phenomenon called ‘ auditory driving’ in which the apparent rate of a flickering light is driven faster or slower by an accompanying beeping sound presented at a different rate.

What people select as beautiful qualities primarily reflect signs of fertility brought on by hormonal changes. Until puberty the faces and body shapes of boys and girls are similar. The rise in estrogen in pubescent girls gives them fuller lips, while testosterone in boys produces a more prominent chin, a larger nose and a fuller jaw. For female, full lips, full buttocks, and a narrow waist broadcast a clear message and for a male, it is the full jaw, stubble and broad chest. This is what we are programmed to find beautiful. Form reflects function.

As women become older, their functions change in ways that depart from these proportions. Middles thicken, lips thin, breasts sag, and so on. All of which broadcast the signal that they are past peak fertility. Even a male teenager with no biology education will be less attracted to an elderly woman than to a young woman. His circuits have a clear mission (reproduction)l his conscious mind receives only the nee-to-know headline (she is attractive, pursue her!) and nothing more.

American neuroscientist Paul MacLean (1950s) suggested that the brain is made of three layers representing successive stages of evolutionary development: the reptilian brain (involved in survival behaviors), the limbic system (involved in emotions) and the newocortex (used in high -order thinking).

Arthur C Clarke was fond of pointing out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The complexity of the system we are is so vast as to be indistinguishable from Clark’s magical technology. In this same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection. The brain is an organ that feels alient and outlandish to us, and yet its detailed wiring patterns sculpt the landscape of our inner lives

Extra virginity - by Tom Mueller

2012-02-10T21:24:00.000-05:00

Extra virginity - by Tom Mueller
The sublime and scandalous world of olive oil

Olive oil is the only commercially significant vegetable oil to be extracted from a fruit rather than seeds, like sunflower, canola, and soy oil. Since the fruit contains considerable water, extraction can be done by mechanical method alone, with a centrifuge or press, whereas extracting seed oils generally requires the use of industrial solvents, typically hexane. To remove this solvent from seed oils, as well as to eliminate the unpleasant tastes and odors they normally have, they must be processed in a refinery, where they undergo high temperature desolventization, neutralization, deodorization, bleaching, and degumming. The end result is a tasteless, odorless, colorless liquid fat. Olive Oil instead can simply be pressed or spun out of the olive pulp, yielding a fresh squeezed fruit juice with all of its natural tastes, aromas, and health-enhancing ingredients intact.

The DeCarlos were pioneers in what has become an authentic renaissance in extra virgin oil in Italy.

The olive tree, Olea Europea L.sativa is hte domesticated cousin of the wild oleaster and the Oleaceae family contains some nine hundred species of trees, shrubs, and woody climbers distributed throughout the world, primarily in forested regions. Some members of the family such as jasmines and lilacs are famous for their flowers while others such as the ashes are known for their fine-grained hardwood.

Still, the olive’s bounty remains something of a puzzle. An Oil’s content of oleic acid, its primary fatty acid can carry from 55 to 85%. Oleic acid and other fatty acids with one double bond are called monounsaturated while those with two or more double bonds are polyunsaturated. The more double bonds a fatty acid contains, the more easily it oxidizes, keeps fresh far longer than other vegetable oils which are polyunsaturated.

The house of wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili

2012-02-05T12:59:00.000-05:00

The house of wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili
How Arabic science saved ancient knowledge and gave us the renaissance.

Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing; knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance. Throughout this book, I use term ‘Arabic science is that carried out by those who were politically under the rule of the Abbasids whose official languages was Arabic or who felt obliged to write their scientific texts in Arabic, the lingua franca of science in the medieval world. This include the great Persian scientists as part of the broad definition (same like Almagest written by Ptolemy as part of Greek science, even though he is an Egyptian)

Abu Ja far Abdulla Al-Mamun - half Arab and half Persian is the central to the book, for he was destined to become the greatest patron of science in the cavalcade of Islamic rulers, and the person responsible for initiating the world’s most impressive period of scholarship and learning since ancient Greece. He was in fact son of an even more famous caliph - called Al-Rashid (763-809) who pops up frequently as a character in the tales of ‘The thousand and one nights’. He is said to have bought a famous pearl called ‘ Al-Yatima (The Orphan Pearl) for 70,0000 gold dinars. Charlemagne is also believed to have given him what is thought to have been world’s largest emerald.

Al-Ma’mun (768-833) was born the same year that his father became caliph. His mother was a Persian slave who arrived in Bagdad as a prisoner of war. As a forfeit of beating him in the game of chess, Al-Rashid’s Arab wife Zubayda insisted that he slept with the ugliest and dirtiest slave in the kitchen and that bore him his first son, Abdulla whom he gave the title of Al-Mamun(The trustworthy)

Under Al-Mamun’s patronage and the spirit of openness and inclusiveness towards other religion and culture that he fostered, many scholars from all over the empire gravitated towards Bagdad drawn by a vibrant sense of optimism and freedom of expression that epitomized the model of this golden age. This is written in the ‘Book of Animals’ by Al-Jahith.

“Our share of wisdom would have been much reduced and our means of acquiring knowledge weakened, had the ancients (the Greeks) not preserved for us their wonderful wisdom, and their various ways of life, in writing which have revealed what was hidden from us and opened what was closed to us, thereby allowing us to add their plenty to the little we have, and to attain what we could not reach without them”

Al-Ma’mun dreamed that he saw a man and he asked him, “ who are you?’ and he replied, “I am Aristotle’. I was delighted to be with him and asked, “O Philosopher, may I ask you a question,”...”What is good?’. Aristotle replied, “Whatever is good according to intellect”. I asked: “Then what?” He replied, “Whatever is good in the opinion of the masses”.

Al-Ma’mun devoted his rest of his life to following the advice granted him by this vision, and sought everywhere to satisfy his craving for knowledge - whatever he deemed ‘good according to intellect’. Although we shall see that the Abbasid’s thirst for ancient texts from Greece, Persia and India and having them translated to Arabic began before al_Ma’mun, it was he who turned into a personal obsession. And it was during his reign that we see the first true geniuses of Arabic science. There was nothing of any real intellectual consequence had taken place in that part of the world since the decline of the Library of Alexandria hundreds of years before the arrival of Islam.

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr” - The prophet Muhammad.

With the weakening of the Roman empire at the beginning of the 5th century, Western Europe slipped rapidly into what is now known as the Dark ages, from which it would not emerge for a 1000 years. By the time of the fall of Rome itself, the center of imperial power in Europe had long since moved eastwards to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Its rule covered Anatolia, Greece, Southern Italy, Syria, Egypt, and North African coast with eastern boarder of Iraq & Syria. The official language of the Byzantines was Greek, and official & dominant religion of the Byzantines was Christianity.

To its east, 4 centuries of Persian Sassanid rule produced an empire stretching from Iraq, & Iran through to central Asia. The middle of the 6th century marked the start of nearly 100 years of long and costly wars between the Sassanians and Byzantines over the lands of Iraq & Syria. By the 7th century, highly organized Muslim armies pushed the Byzantines out of Syria & Asia Minor then the Sasanians were defeated and crushed.

Before the arrival of Islam, the only other sovereign power in the region in Yemen and the rest of Arabia was inhabited mostly by nomadic Arab tribes. Two great cities in western Arabia had been trading centers for 100s of years before the arrival of Islam and their names were Macoraba & Yathrib and they were destined to become the two holiest cities in Islam: Mecca & Madina. Mecca housed many shrines and sanctuaries for the worship of several hundred different gods. All these gods had sanctuaries in or near Mecca, including within the Ka’ba itself. Pre-Islamic pagans would make pious visits to Mecca from all over Arabia and even walk around the Ka’ba, giving offerings to their gods.

A century before the birth of Islam one of the most powerful tribes in Arabia, the Quraysh, began to spread its influence in Mecca and it was from one of the less influential clans within this tribe that a 40-year old illiterate merchant named Muhammad announced in the year 610 that the angel Gabriel had appeared before him to reveal the word of God while he was meditating alone in a cave in Mount Hira overlooking the city. According to Islamic history, Muhammad was initially distressed at seeing the vision of angel. When he came down from the mountain he was consoled by his wife Khadija who immediately informed her Christian cousin, Waraqh ibn Nawfal, who immediately informed Muhammad that he had been chose as a new prophet, for God had also sent the angel Gabriel down to Moses two thousand years earlier and it was Gabriel who had told Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. Muhammad declared his mission and his first convert was his wife Khalija herself, followed by members of his family and close companions.

The Arabic word for God, Allah comes from a construction of two words Al-Illah , meaning The God. Arabic speaking Christians and Jews also use the same word Allah to mean God in their religions. Once his mission became clear, Muhammad would order all shrines in Mecca destroyed, but the Ka’ba itself remains to this day, situated within the largest mosque in the world, Al-Mashid al-Haram.

Translation:

“The significance of the Greco-Arabic translation movement lies in that it demonstrated for the first time in history that scientific and philosophical thought are international, not bound to a specific language or culture” - Dimitiri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arab Culture.

Why did the golden age of Arabic science that blossomed so suddenly during the reign of the early Abbasid caliphs begin? The common view is that the exciting advances made in mathematics, astronomy, physics and engineering, the industrialization of chemistry, the great progress in medicine and the flourishing of philosophy that took place, first in Bagdad and then elsewhere in Islamic empire, all began thanks to the success of a spectacularly massive movement -a process that lasted 200 years - during which much of the wisdom of the earlier civilization of the Greeks, Persians and Indians was translated into Arabic. Then, once a culture of scholarship had taken hold within the Islamic Empire, it quickly became self-sustaining, leading to grand synthesis of scientific knowledge that grew to far outstrip the sum of what had come before.

Al-Fazari, one of the astrologers who advised al-Mansur and the man credited with building the first astrolabe in the Muslim world is also associated with translating several astronomical texts from Sanskrit to Arabic. It has even been claimed that he was the first to translate the Siddhanta, written by the greatest Indian mathematician and astronomer, Brahmangupta (568-668) into Arabic. The Arabic translation of this text is known as Sindhind and along with Ptolemy’s Almagest and Euclid’s Elements,, it was destined to have huge influence on the scholars of Bagdad.

Elephant Clock – an engineering marvel:
When it comes to feats of engineering in the Islamic Empire, I can do no better than to mention its most famous engineer, Ibn Ismail Al-Jazari (1136-1206) and describe his best known invention, Elephant Clock. His six foot high water powered ‘Elephant Clock is on the engineering wonders of the mediaeval world; an object of artistic beauty as well as engineering brilliance. It used Archimedes water principles combined with Indian water-timing devices and was made up of a hollow model of an Indian elephant ridden by two Arabian figures, on a Persian carpet, with Chinese dragons and Egyptian phoenix.

The clock is based on what is called a perforated float, which acts as the actuator and timekeeper for all parts of the clock. Inside the belly of the hollow elephant is a tank of water in which is floating a bowl with a tiny hole in its bottom. The hole has been carefully drilled to allow in water at a precise rate, such that the bowl completely drilled to allow in exactly half an hour. A small chain that can only flex up and down keeps the bowl close to the side do the tank thus allowing it to only move vertically. As the bowl fills, it gradually submerges into the tank and pulls on a string attached to a pulley above the elephant that cause the scribe to slowly rotate, marking out minutes. Once full, the bowl sinks more rapidly, triggering several mechanisms: a separate compartment within the float forces air through a flute, which gives off a sound suggesting the phoenix at the top of the clock that contains a number of metal balls. This channel tilts and releases a ball that rolls down, first onto fan blades that forces the phoenix to rotate, then into the mouth of on the dragons, causing to tip forward. As it does so, its tail rises and pulls on the float in the belly of the elephant. This action raises the float to the surface while tipping and emptying it to allow the whole half-hour process to be repeated. Meanwhile, the ball falls out of the dragon’s mouth onto a plate that moves the elephant driver’s arms as well as striking a cymbal hidden inside the elephant. Once the ball is released from the dragon it pivots back up again ready to receive another ball one hour later (since the two dragons alternate their actions with each ball). Of course, the ball channel would have to be constantly replenished with balls for the clock to continue working.

“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind” - Khalil Gibran.

“We ought not to be embraced about appreciating the truth and obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nation’s different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it” - Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kinid

“During the most splendid period of Islamic Spain, ignorance was regarded as so disgraceful that those without education concealed the fact as far as possible, just as they would have hidden the commission of a crime” - S.P.Scott. History of the Moorish’s Empire in Europe.

Coffee:
Another gift from the Arabs is coffee - esp. as it was originally banned in Europe as a ‘Muslim drink’. Its use can be tracked down to 9th century Ethiopia where according to legend, an Arab named Khalid observed that his goats became livelier after eating the berries of the coffee plant,
Intrigued, he boiled the berries in water to produce the first cup of coffee. From Ethiopia, the drink spread to Egypt and Yemen, but it was in Arabia that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed as is done today. The story of coffee finally comes in full-circle when in 2007; an agreement was reached after a high profile court battle between the Gov. of Ethiopia, the home of coffee and the coffee giants Starbuck over copyright of trademark names of certain Ethiopian coffee beans.

It is that the golden age came suddenly crashing to an end in 1258 with the Mongols’ destruction of Bagdad during which most of the books in the House of Wisdom were destroyed by Mongolian army of Hulahu. Although accounts differ, many historians estimate that a large fraction of the city’s population, which by then could have numbered close to a million, were massacred by the Mongols within the space of a single week in Feb. of that year. So fierce was the assault that Bagdad never recovered and after five hundred years, Abbasid rule was suddenly over.

One significant factor that played a role was the reluctance of the Muslim world and the Ottoman Empire in particular, to embrace the printing press quickly enough. This is particularly poignant when one considers that the first ever book to be printed in England was the ‘Dictes and Saying of the Philosophers’ in 1477 which was the English translation of an Arabic text. Printing in Arabic type represented the early typesetters with far greater problems than Latin because of the cursive nature of Arabic script and added complication when joining up letters due to different shapes they take according onto their position in a word.

The experience economy by B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore

2012-01-28T20:48:00.001-05:00

The experience economy by B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore
Work is theater and every business a stage.

[Wonderful book that explains correlations between artistic world & transformation business and categorically states the importance of experience in any business, if it wants to succeed]

Economist Tibor Scitovsky notes that ‘man’s main response to increasing affluence seems to be an increase in the frequency of festive meals.; he adds to the number of special occasions and holidays considered worthy of them and ultimately, he makes them routine - in the form, say, of Sunday dinners. The same is true of experience we pay for. We are going out to eat more frequently at increasingly experimental venues.

Companies stage an experience whenever they engage customers, connecting with them in personal, memorable way. Experiences are events that engage individuals in a personal way. Staging experience is not about entertaining customers, it is about engaging them.

Economic Distinctions:

Economic Offerings: Commodities: Goods: Services: Experiences: Transformations

Economy: Agrarian: Industrial: Service: Experience: Transformation
Economic function: Extract: Make: Deliver: Stage: Guide
Nature of Offering: Fungible: Tangible: Intangible: Memorable: Effectual
Key Attribute: Natural: Standardized: Customized: Personal: Individual
Method of Supply: Stored in Bulk: Inventoried after production: Delivered on Demand: Revealed over a duration: Sustained through time
Seller: Trader: Manufacturer: Provider: Stager: Elicitor
Buyer: Market: Customer: Client: Guest: Aspirant
Factors of Demand: Characteristics: Features: Benefits: Sensations: Traits

By definition, commodities are fungible - they are what they are. Because commodities cannot be differentiated. “The best thing in life are not things”, says Rebecca Pine.

Experience Realms:
It is a four quadrant with four axis (Passive Participation, Immersion, Active Participation & Absorption) - horizontal axis (passive to active participation - Guest Participation) & vertical axis(absorption to immersion- experience -kind of connection or environmental relationship)

Between Passive participation Immersion - It is Esthetic
Between Immersion & Active Participation - it is Escapist
Between Active Participation & Absorption - it is Educational
Between Absorption & Passive Participation - it is entertainment.

Entertainment Experience: The kind of experience most people think of as entertainment occur when they passively absorb the experiences through their senses as generally occurs when viewing a performance or reading for pleasure. As the experience economy gears up, people will look in new and different directions for more unusual experiences.

Educational Experience: With education experience a guest absorbs the events unfolding before him while actively participating. Stan Davis & Jim Botkin mentioned in ‘The Monster Under the Bed’: “In the new learning marketplace, customers, employees and students are all active listeners or even accurately, interactively learners”.

Escapist Experience: involve much greater immersion than entertainment or education experience. (e.g. theme parks, casinos, chat rooms). The guest if the escapist experience is completely immersed in it, an actively involved participant.

Esthetic experience: In such experience, individuals immerse themselves in an event or environment but themselves have little or no effect on it, leaving the environment essentially untouched. (E.g. standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, visiting art gallery, )

The richest experience encompass aspects of all four realms these center around the ‘sweet spot’ in the middle of the framework. Set the stage by exploring the possibilities of each realm.

While designing your experience, you should consider the following questions.
1. What can be done to improve the aesthetic of the experience? You want to create an atmosphere in which your guests feel free ‘to be’.
2. Once there, what should your guests do? Focus on what you should encourage guest ‘to do’, if they are to become active participants in the experience.
3. The educational aspect of an experience, like the escapist, is essentially active. What do you want your guest ‘to learn’ from the experience? What information or activates will help to engage them in the exploration of knowledge and skills?
4. What can you do by way of entertainment to get your guests ‘to stay’? How can you make the experience more fun and more enjoyable? Professional speakers lace their speeches with jokes to hold the attention of their audience to get them to listen to the ideas.

(The idea of Disneyland is simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge). In his insightful book ‘The Themeing of America’ sociology professor Mark Gottdinener identifies ten themes that often materialist in the ‘built environments’ that the calls stages experience and these are:

Status, Tropical Paradise, Wild West, Classical civilization, Nostalgia, Arabian fantasy, Urban motif, fortress architecture and surveillance, modernism and progress, representations of unrepresentable(Vietnam veterans memorial wall)

Marketing professors Bernd Schmitt and Alex Simonson in their instructive book ‘Marketing Aesthetics’ offers nine domains:

History, religion, fashion, politics, psychology, philosophy, the physical world, popular culture and the arts.

Five principles are paramount in developing such a theme.
1. An engaging theme must alter a guest’s sense of reality
2.The richness venues posses themes that fully alter one’s sense of reality by affecting the experience of space, time and matter
3. Engaging themes integrate space, time and matter into a cohesive realistic whole. Dr. Henry M. Morris states, “It is not that the universe is a triad of three distinct entities (time, space & matter) whihc, when added together comprises the whole”
4. Themes are strengthened by creating multiple places within a place.
5. A theme should fit the character of the enterprise staging the experience.

While the theme forms the foundation of an experience, the experience must be rendered with indelible impressions (take always). Professor Schmitt and Simonson again provide a useful list, this one delineating six dimensions of overall impression:
1. Time - traditional, contemporary, or futuristic representation of the theme
2. Space - City/Country, West/East, Indoor/Outdoor, House/Business representations
3. Technology - hand-made/machine -made, natural/artificial representations
4. Authenticity - original or imitative representations
5. Sophistication - Yielding refined/unrefined or luxurious/cheap representations
6. Scale: Representing the theme as grand or small.

The experience must leave indelible impressions. A theme should fit the character of the enterprise staging the experience. Companies must introduce cues affirming the nature of the experience. Different kinds of experience rely on different kinds of impressions. Experience stagers eliminate anything that distracts from the theme. Too many haphazard cues can ruin an experience. People purchase memorabilia as tangible artifacts or experience. The price point is a function of the value of remembering the experience. The more sensory an experience, the more memorable it will be.

Among the numerous categories of activities in which guests delight and that could apply to any experience are the following.

· Period demonstrations (glass making, book binding etc)
· Crafts that guests perform themselves (candle-making, brass rubbing)
· Games, contests and other challenges for which prizes are awarded
· Human and animal powered rides
· Food
· Drinks
· Shows, ceremonies and parades.

Companies should use it to create customer-unique value, the portal through which expedience reach individual customers. An economic offering confers customers-unique value at its ideal, when it is:

Specific to individual customers- brought into being at a particular moment for this precise customer
Particular in its characteristics - designed to meet this customer’s individual needs
Singular in its purpose to benefit this customer - not trying to be any more or less than, but rather only and exactly what customer desires.

Customers don’t want choice; they just want exactly what they want. All customers deserve to have exactly what they want at a price they are willing to pay.

Mass customization and one-to-one marketing enable learning relationships and the advantage of this approach are:
Premium price, reduced discounts, greater revenue per customer, higher number of customers, increased customer retention.

Four types of customer sacrifice leading to your approaches to customization.

Adaptive customization offer one product designed to let users alter it themselves
cosmetic customization, present a standard good or service differently to different customers
transparent customization provide a tailored offering without customers knowing that it is customized for them
collaborative customization, work with their customers to determine what they need and then produce it for them.

Employee in an enterprise is a performer and his/her work is theater and hence, acts accordingly. Acting is taking deliberate steps to connect with an audience.

Four forms of theater:
1. Platform theater allows for little variations and use Platform Theater when workers do not directly interact with customers.

2. Matching theater, integrated portions of work into a unified whole and scripts in matching theater are always dynamic. Use matching theater when the same customers and the same performers interact over and over.

3. Street theater performers draw people in amaze them and then ask for money (sales people)

4. Improve theatre involves new-to the world performance. If you are winging it, you are doing improv. Improvisation involves imagination, creativity. (New offer intro to the market)
You must determine what forms of theater to perform.

Staging business performances: the act of acting differentiates memorable experience from ordinary activity.

Drama = Strategy; Script=process; theater=work; performance=offering
cast=people; role=responsibilities; characterization =representations; ensemble=organization to engage guests in memorable ways.

When you customize an experience, you change the individual. Transformation offerings will emerge across almost every part of the service sector. Transformations are as distinct from experiences as experiences are from services. The individual buyer of the transformation essentially says ’change me’.

For example, see the insurance industry successive economic offerings.

Service - Insure - secure payment in the event of loss
Experience - assure - secure confidence, encouragement, trust or feeling of satisfaction
Transformation - Ensure - Secure event, situation or outcome.

Transformations cannot be extracted, made, delivered, or even staged: they can only be guided. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” No one can force someone to change. Employees themselves who make sure they have the resources for a competence boost as soon as they feel it is needed. Transformation elicitors can, at best, bring about the right situation under which the proper change can occur, meaning staging the right experiences that involve the right services.

Three phases of guiding transformations.

1. Diagnosing aspirations. Without proper diagnosis, customers cannot achieve their aspirations. Essential to every transformation, is the understanding what the customer truly needs to become and how far way he is from fulfilling those needs within himself., even if the customer does not realize it or deludes himself about the direction or magnitude of the change required.

2. Staging transforming experiences. Elicitors may use any one of the four realms of experience for a transformation. Entertainment experience can alter our view of the world, while educational experiences can make us rethink how we fit into that world. Escapist experiences can boost our personal capabilitie4s and characteristics to new levels, while esthetic experiences can imbue a sense of wonder, beauty and appreciation.

3. Following through. It is not truly transformation unless it is sustained.

The ServiceMaster Company reminds us, ‘The spirit and souls of people can be enriched by what they do as they server and work. And they can grow in the process of who they are becoming”. The very idea of transforming people(companies) demands that we think about and apply a world little used in business today: Wisdom (the quality of being wise, esp. in relation to conduct and the choice of means and ends; the combination of experience and knowledge with the ability to apply them judiciously; sound judgment, prudence, practical sense”.

When the offering becomes more intangible the value becomes more tangible. Nothing is more important than the wisdom required to transform customers. Being in the transformation business means charging for the demonstrated outcome.

Consider the business of consulting and if consulting truly viewed themselves as being in the business of transformation, they would, spend much more time in the up-front diagnose phase, identifying clients, strategic needs as well as their capacity for change. They would stop writing analytical docs and start staging memorable events that would enable the client first to experience what it would be like to live and work in a world where the strategy has been achieved and then to actually create that future world.

If you charge for the demonstrated outcome the customer achieves, then and only then are you in the transformation business. In this transformation phase, following are happening,

· Organization: new aims are determined - Work that generates value from something new

· Execution: Guiding is the core activity of the elicitor - work that generates value from something done.

· Correction: A relapse triggers stronger resolve - work that generates value from something improved

· Application: Preserving connects with aspirants - work that generates value from something used.

Business needs a strategy for managing these four dimensions of value creation: Determine new aims, guiding the individual, strengthening resolve, preserving with the aspirant.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

2012-01-22T19:39:00.001-05:00

[STEPHEN WOZNIAK – one of the three founders of Apple. He is a gem of a person. However, such good hearted people cannot grow up much. Steve is a tough person (control freak & perfectionist) and the book showed no mercy in revealing all aspect of his personality that includes ‘the other side’.

This is a great book on an amazing genius of our time.

Following some of my picks!]

[His Childhood & college life] Seventeen years earlier, Jobs’s parents had made a pledge when they adopted him: He would go to college. So they had worked hard and saved dutifully for his college fund, which was modest but adequate by the time he graduated.

But Jobs, becoming ever more willful, did not make it easy. Instead he insisted on applying only to Reed College, a private liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, that was one of the most expensive in the nation. He was visiting Woz at Berkeley when his father called to say an acceptance letter had arrived from Reed, and he tried to talk Steve out of going there. So did his mother. It was far more than they could afford, they said. But their son responded with an ultimatum: If he couldn’t go to Reed, he wouldn’t go anywhere. They relented, as usual.

[When he decided to drop from the expensive college, Reed]Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his parents’ money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.”

[India Trip] At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy man who was holding a gathering of his followers at the Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. “It was a chance to meet a spiritual being and hang out with his followers, but it was also a chance to have a good meal. I could smell the food as we got near, and I was very hungry.” As Jobs was eating, the holy man—who was not much older than Jobs—picked him out of the crowd, pointed at him, and began laughing maniacally. “He came running over and grabbed me and made a tooting sound and said, ‘You are just like a baby,’” recalled Jobs. “I was not relishing this attention.” Taking Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful crowd and walked him up to a hill, where there was a well and a small pond. “We sit down and he pulls out this straight razor. I’m thinking he’s a nutcase and begin to worry. Then he pulls out a bar of soap—I had long hair at the time—and he lathered up my hair and shaved my head. He told me that he was saving my health.

Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of the summer, and Jobs went back to New Delhi to meet him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly. By this point Jobs was no longer trying to find a guru who could impart wisdom, but instead was seeking enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation, and simplicity. He was not able to achieve inner calm. Kottke remembers him getting into a furious shouting match

with a Hindu woman in a village marketplace who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the milk she was selling them.

After coming back to US after seven months in India: “My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I said ‘Hi!’”

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work. Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom. Zen Buddhism has been a deep influence in my life ever since.

Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock—Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era. The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since

Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life, Jobs told Markoff. People who had never taken acid would never fully understand him.

His mischievous interview questions were “How many of you are virgins? How many of you have taken LSD?”

Asked if he wanted to do market research, he said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

[Perfection to the details] Rand came up with a colorful type treatment, which Jobs liked, but they ended up having a lengthy and heated disagreement about the placement of the period after the “P” in Steven P. Jobs. Rand had placed the period to the right of the “P.”, as it would appear if set in lead type. Steve preferred the period to be nudged to the left, under the curve of the “P.”, as is possible with digital typography. “It was a fairly large argument about something relatively small,” Susan Kare recalled. On this one Jobs prevailed.

[Another mischievous] At one point Jobs and Ellison (Founder/CEO Oracle) pulled a prank on a clueless computer consultant who was campaigning for the job(as CEO of Apple); they sent him an email saying that he had been selected, which caused both amusement and embarrassment when stories appeared in the papers that they were just toying with him.

[Ellison's plan to buy out Apple for his best buddy, Jobs [when Jobs were ousted from Apple] Once again Ellison publicly floated the idea of doing a hostile takeover and installing his “best friend” Jobs as CEO. “Steve’s the only one who can save Apple,” he told reporters. “I’m ready to help him the minute he says the word.”

“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy. He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said.

“In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.”

Recounting the scene (Think Different Advertisement) years later, Jobs started to cry. This chokes me up, this really chokes me up. It was so clear that Lee loved Apple so much. Here was the best guy in advertising. And he hadn’t pitched in ten years. Yet here he was, and he was pitching his heart out, because he loved Apple as much as we did. He and his team had come up with this brilliant idea, “Think Different.” And it was ten times better than anything the other agencies showed. It choked me up, and it still makes me cry to think about it, both the fact that Lee cared so much and also how brilliant his “Think Different” idea was. Every once
in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity—purity of spirit and love—and I always cry. It always just reaches in and grabs me. That was one of those moments. There was a purity about that I will never forget. I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it.

[Steve’s return to Apple where he cut most of existing products and retained only four] After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two

columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. “The room was in dumb silence,” Schiller recalled.

In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone.“Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”

[Comparing Microsoft] The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

[On Android] Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

[Taking his high-school son, Reed during iPhone 4 Antenna crisis] “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.”

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing. Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. Folks are rushing into this tablet market, and they’re looking at it as the next PC, in which the hardware and the software are done by different companies. Our experience, and every bone in our body, says that is not the right approach. These are post-PC devices that need to be even more intuitive and easier to use than a PC, and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to be intertwined in an even more seamless way than they are on a PC. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds of products. It was an architecture that was bred not just into the organization he had built, but into his own soul.

The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a pilgrimage to the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton, for example, came by and talked about everything from the Middle East to American politics. But the most poignant visit was from the other tech prodigy born in 1955, the guy who, for more than three decades, had been Jobs’s rival and partner in defining the age of personal computers. Bill Gates had never lost his fascination with Jobs. Through their mutual friend Mike Slade, Gates made arrangements to visit Jobs in May. The day before it was supposed to happen, Jobs’s assistant called to say he wasn’t feeling well enough. But it was rescheduled, and early one afternoon Gates drove to Jobs’s house, walked through the back gate to the open kitchen door, and saw Eve studying at the table. “Is Steve around?” he asked. Eve pointed him to the living room. Their discussion lasted three hours.

When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and politics, he offered a few sharp opinions about the lack of strong leadership around the world. “I’m disappointed in Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a problem I ever had.”

Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries:

• The Apple II, which took Wozniak’s circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.
• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical user interfaces.
• Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital imagination.
• Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
• The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
• The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.
• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and web devices.
• The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.
• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.
• And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. You’ve got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code- words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.

Then he looked at her (Ann Bowers, the widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce) and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her: “Tell me, what was I like when I was young?” Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very difficult,” she replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the reward.’ That turned out to be true.”

What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.

“I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”

Supercapitalism by Robert B. Reich

2012-01-16T09:13:00.002-05:00

Supercapitalism by Robert B. Reich
The transformation of business, democracy and everyday life
[Scholarly book that tries to answer few tough questions]

Milton Friedman reiterated his long-held belief that free markets were a necessary precondition to political freedom and sustainable democracy. Yet as we have seen over the past several decades, particularly in Southeast Asia, democracy may not be essential to democracy. Democracy means more than a process of free and fair elections. Democracy is a system for accomplishing what can only be achieved by citizens together with other citizens - to determine the rules of the game whose outcomes express the common good. Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens.

Since the 1970s this all has changed radically. Large firms became far more competitive, global and innovative. Something I call Supercapitalism was born. In this transformation we in our capacities as consumers and investors have done significantly better. Consumer power became aggregated and enlarged by mass retailers like Wal-Mart that used the collective bargaining clout of millions of consumers to get great deals from suppliers. Investor power became aggregated and enlarged by large pension funds and mutual funds which pushed companies to generate higher returns. But the institutions that had negotiated to spread the wealth and protect what citizens valued in common began to disappear.

Why CEO pay has soared into the stratosphere and what prevented it from souring before. Why inflation less of a threat than it was three or four decades ago? Why antitrust laws are less important today as a means of restraining economic power than they were previously. Why there are many lobbyists in DC than three decades ago?

Companies of all sizes are competing more vigorously than before. The world economy contains far fewer oligopolies than it did decades ago. The power and the impetus that once came from the giant corporations’ are gone. Deregulation for example, unleashed many of America’s industries. Variously dubbed ‘neoliberalism, neoclassical economics, neo-conservatism or the Washington consensus, these precepts included free trade, deregulation, privatization and in general more reliance on markets than on gov. and more concern for efficiency than equity.

Large firms (e.g. Wal-Mart) are not brutally insensitive or ruthlessly greedy. They are doing what they are supposed to do, according to the current rules of the game - giving their customers good deals and thereby maximizing the returns to their investors. Just like players in any game, they are doing whatever is necessary to win. Personally I’d be willing to sacrifice some of the benefits I get as a consumer and investor in order to achieve these social ends - as long as I knew everyone else was, too.

Roughly between 1945 & 1975, America struck a remarkable accommodation between capitalism and democracy. The economy was based on mass production/ Mass production was profitable because a large middle class had enough money to purchase what could be mass-produced. Before that period too productivity surged. An economic resolution on this scale inevitably had large social consequence. Supply outran demand, leading to sever depression that jolted much of Euro & US in 1873. With silver far more abundant than gold, this would inflate currency values and thereby shrink the debts. Manufactures on both side of the Atlantic wanted higher tariffs to protect from foreign imports (Only Britain whose advanced manufactures were the primary beneficiaries of free trade, decline to raise its tariffs, resulting in what were seen there as German and American ‘economic invasions’)

As America and every other manufacturing nation began scouring more backward regions of the globe for potential markets, the term ‘imperialism’ entered common speech. Britain and Germany equated their economic prowess with their nation’s global spheres of influence. J.A.Hobson - a British Economist - predicted the logical endpoint of such competition: Businessmen opt for war when they have exhausted their home markets.

The size of massive enterprise and their market became almost impregnable for smaller firms that might wish to enter the market. Of the Fortune 500 largest corp. in 1994, more than half founded between 1880 & 1930.These giant corp. of mid-century America necessarily possessed vast discretion and economic power.

Starting in the mid 1970s, the large oligopolies that anchored the American system began to teeter. Technologies have empowered consumers and investors to get better and better deals. Entry barriers collapsed at an accelerating pace. Today low costs can be matched by many potential rivals who don’t produce in large scale. They use software to do their billing, procurement and inventory controls, rely internet for customer service and depend on internet auctions to subcontract production to the lowest-cost and most reliable bidders.

By the late 1970s, the defense dept was underwriting 70% of the R&D fund’s of the nation’s aircraft industry. Look back on many other high technologies that took flight in the last decades of the 20th century, you will see similar patterns. US Gov provided half the R&D funding of the nation’s telecom industry - fiber optics, satellites, etc. University research extended discoveries and entrepreneurs developed it further. Small businesses were founded. Niche market discovered. Within a few years, the entire economy began to shift. Within two or three decades, a new economy was replacing the old.

Three developments bear particular mention.
1. Globalization
2. New production process
3. Deregulation
All these hastened the demise of economies of scale and the mid-century of democratic capitalism.

When Wall-Street analyst’s recommendation changed from buy to sell, the odds increased by nearly 50% that CEO would be fired within the following six months. The impact of such downgrades on CEO tenure was even greater than the impact of declining profits or even falling share prices. CEOs are turning over a faster clip and a record number of are being forced out.

The road to Supercapitalism began with technologies that emerged from the Cold War - containers, cargo ships and planes, fiber-optic cables, Satellite communications... They allowed the creation of global supply chain. they also spurred the commercial development of computers and software that could produce items at low cost without large scale and eventfully distribute services over the Internet. All this shattered the old system of large scale production and dramatically increased competition. Together emerging technologies and financial deregulations opened the way for investors to put their savings into giant mutual funds and pension funds that pressures companies for higher returns. CEOs who delivered were generously rewarded.
Finally intensifying completion for consumers and investors put pressure on companies to cut payrolls, hitting unionized workers especially hard. Power shifted to consumers and investors. Supercapitalism replaced democratic capitalism.

Intensifying competition for us as consumers and investors has made the entire economy more productive. In order to be successful, CEOs and financiers have had to move money, machinery, factories and other assess to where they can be most valuable. And of course, they have moved, demoted or promoted or laid off million people.

[The rest of the book goes over these topics in very detail and followed by author’s recommendation as a citizen to reduce the impact of Supercapitalism for goodness to the citizens. Currently American companies are benefited, not the American people]

The rise of the creative class by Richard Florida

2012-01-15T19:53:00.004-05:00

The rise of the creative class by Richard Florida
and how it is transforming wok, leisure, community and everyday life.

[We are transforming from knowledge based economy to creative class based economy; talk about who are the creative class and their impact to our society and how can we create environment for alluring them for economic prosperity – another scholarly book]

Take a typical man on the street from the year 1900 and drop him into 1950s. The take someone from 1950s and drop him to present day. Who would experience the greater change?

There are two ways to see this puzzle. A person from the turn of the 20th century would be awestruck by a world filled with baffling technological wonders. He will see biggest wonder not only on the streets, but also at home too. The second person will not see that many wonders as the first one in the space of technology advancement. But when we try to see it from social and cultural world, we shall find that the first person would not find big difference and the second person will see biggest surprise (dress code, women in the working class, reality shows, social networking where people share private memories to unknown friends, trust unknown person compared to his/her neighbor.

What caused this transformation? The logic behind the transformation has been unclear to this point because the transformation is still in progress. But lately a number of diverse and seemingly unconnected threads are starting to come together. That driving force is the rise of human creativity as they key factor in our economy and society. Both at work and in other sphere of our lives, we value creativity more highly than ever and cultivate it more intensely.

Creativity is multinational and comes in many mutually reinforcing forms. Max Webber said long ago that the Protestant ethic provided the underlying spirit of thrift, hard work and efficiency that motivated the rise of early capitalism. In similar fashion, the shared commitments to the creative spirit in its many, a varied manifestation underpins the new creative ethos that powers our age.

In the new world, it is no longer the organizations we work for, churches, neighborhoods or even families that define us. Instead, we do these ourselves, defining our identities along the varied dimensions of our creativity. We often tend to classify people on the basis of their consumption habits or lifestyle choices or more crudely by their income level. A class is a cluster of people who have common interests are fundamentally determined by economic function by the kind of work they do for a living.

George Gilder describes the internet will make customer as the product and product is the customer and both server one another, in a rhythm of creativity between producers and users, a resonance of buyers and sellers in which the buyers also sell and sellers also buy in widening web of commerce. The resonance is wealth and the light and there is no impedance in the middle.

Creativity is not just intelligence - the ability to deal with or process large amounts of data - favors creative potential, it is not synonymous with creativity. Paul Romer has argued that the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas which are ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas. Taken together, following three things will bring social structure of creativity,.
1. New systems for technological creativity and entrepreneurship
2. New and more effective models for producing goods and service
3. A broad social cultural and geographic milieu conductive to creativity of all sorts.

The creative class has three values in common
1. Individuality - The members of the creative class exhibit a strong preference for individuality and self-statement. They don’t want to conform to organizational directives and resist traditional group oriented norms
2. Meritocracy - Merit is strongly valued by creative class; they favor hard work, challenge stimulation. Its members have a propensity for goal-setting and achievement.
3. Diversity and Openness - The favor organization and environment in which they feel that anyone can fit in and can get ahead.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Fogel says “Today’s people are increasingly concerned with what life is all about. That was not true for the ordinary individual in 1800s when nearly the whole day was devoted to earning the food, clothing and shelter needed to sustain life”. We live differently and pursue new lifestyles because we see ourselves as a new kind of person. We are more tolerant and liberal both because our material conditions allow it and because the new creative age tells us to be so.

Money is the only thing the creative class wants and following are observed.
1. Yes, people want enough money to live in the manner they prefer
2. Even if earning enough to pay the bills, they will be unhappy if they feel they are being paid what they are worth as gauged
3. But while the absence of enough money is sufficient, to make them happy with their work, money alone will not make most workers happy or committed or motivated.

Following are top ten highly valued job factors from information week’s survey.
1. Challenge and responsibility
2. Flexibility
3. A stable work environment and a relatively secure job
4. Compensation
5. Professional development
6.Peer recognition
7. Stimulating colleagues and managers
8. Exciting job content
9. Org culture
10. Location and community

The new labor market shaped by these trends has three chief characteristics.
1. People today tend to pursue their careers horizontally rather than vertically. Climbing the corporate ladder is no longer so popular. Perhaps because there is not as much of a ladder in many of today’s leaner, flatter firms - and it is liable to shift or vanish before you are halfway up. Instead more of us swing from tree to tree in search of various fruit.

2. People have come to identify more with their occupation or profession than with a company. This is partly the product of the move to domain-specific knowledge. In search of greater challenge, autonomy or satisfaction, people once again tend to move horizontally rather than vertically.
3. People bear more responsibility for every aspect of their careers. We not only assume the risks of our jobs move, we assume the task of taking care of our creativity - investing in it, supporting it and nurturing it. They go through basic port-of-entry education, education for a career-track change and ongoing learning and upgrading of skills. Skill acquisition has become an individual responsibility., both because the interactive nature of computer tools allows new media workers to learn new skills as their own pace and within their own learning styles and because formal learning programs have not kept pace with skills needs in this fast changing industry.

Peter Drucker writes,” What motivates knowledge workers is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees precisely because they do not get a paycheck”. The commitment of creative people is highly contingent and their motivation comes largely from within.

In the creative economy, time is the only nonrenewable resources. The three big factors driving this economy, along with the need for creativity, are the prevalence of change, the need for flexibility and the importance of speed. Paul Romer writes, “Our children will have more of almost everything, with one glaring exception: They won’t have more time in the day. As income and wages increase, the cost of time will continue to grow and so will the sense that time is scarce and that life proceeds at a faster pace than in the past.”

(Considering the value of time, if Bill Gates drops $10,000 bill , it is small bill for Bill to bother with The time that he needs to spend (4 sec) to pick it up from the floor, is more than $10,000 considering his wealth.)

Steve Tomlinson captured the whole dynamic perfectly in a satiric monologue titled Perfect Pitch.
http://books.google.com/books?id=4AcGvt3oX6IC&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=perfect+pitch+a+performance+piece+for+the+austin+360+summit&source=bl&ots=th0QvFBknX&sig=vfsdk1wvMbFXv9JyWbppWYjJY0s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6F0TT4-BBqn10gG6n4SmAw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=perfect%20pitch%20a%20performance%20piece%20for%20the%20austin%20360%20summit&f=false

Following is from the ‘Perfect Pitch”.
We can divide the market into three segments
1. People with passion who believe that they on mission from God believe in what they are doing because they love it
2. People with drive - Greedy people - chasing the herd from one gold rush to another, trampling each other on the way.
3. Reasonable people - people with passion and drive. Here is a guy who starts with passion (idea) and he believes it is cool and hoping that other people will like it - so he starts a little business and sure enough some people want it. So the business grows and that means more people and investors and the market. And when the herd gets involved - cool is not enough,. It is got to be hot. It’s got to be the next big thing. And so our guy with a cool idea is suddenly riding the buzz of the next big, hot, scalable thing and people he has seen in magazine are talking to him - promising fame and more money than he and his family could ever spend. So he is ready to sacrifice and we offer him stock in deferred-life and make a rational calculation and as long as his upside fantasy covers the costs, he buys in - he outsources his fulfillment and he shifts form cool to hot. his vital signs follow the NASDAQ, his vision clouds and before long he is making bets with his life that even the craziest VCs would not touch. So we focus our efforts right here. On this calculation, ignore the bears. We simply put the costs and benefits in perspective and the customer sees that he needs us now more than ever. ..

Deepening the moment: If one cannot elongate time, perhaps one can deepen or intensify it, getting more from each bit. To me this is the key difference in our use of time and it can be more insidious than long hours. In ‘Time for Life’ Robinson and Godbey suggests that there are four basic strategies for time deepening.

1. The speeding up of activities
2. Substituting a leisure activity that can be done more quickly for one that takes longer, such as getting take-out or home delivery rather than cooking, playing racquetball rather than a slower game like tennis - or in my case, an hour of spinning in the gym as opposed to two or three hour bike ride with friends
3. Multitasking or doing more than one thing at once. Watching TV while reading news paper, using cell phone while driving etc
4. Detailed time planning and budgeting - esp. for leisure or recreational activiti4s,: compartmentalizing time so as to get a handle on it. What astounds me more than anything is that my students now carry personal organizers with their days parceled into half-hour chunks.

In general, write Robinson and Godbey, we are shifting from the consumption of good to the consumption of experience. In their insightful book ‘The experience economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore observe that consumers are coming to favor the consumption of experience over traditional goods and service.

“Experience is a fourth economic offering, as distinct from service as services are from goods. While commodities are fungible, goods tangible and services intangible, experience are memorable. The Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel sums up the situation this way: “Today ordinary people wish to use their liberated time to buy those amenities of life that only the rich could afford in abundance a century ago... The principle cost off these activities is not measured by cash outlays, but outlays of time”. And with the life having become the scarce and precious commodity, many increasingly define the quality of their lives by the quality of experience they consume.

A new resolution of the centuries old tension between two value systems: protestant work ethics and the bohemian ethic. Protestant ethic says meaning is to be found in hard work and the bohemian ethic is more hedonistic. It says value is to be found in pleasure and happiness - not necessarily in gross indulgence or gluttonous excess, but in experiencing and appreciating what life has to offer.

Bohemian ethic came to signify everything the protestant work ethic was not.

Creative community: How do we decide where to live and work? What really matters to us in making this kind of decision? How ahs this changed? And why? A number of consistent themes emerges from my research:

1. The creative class is moving away from traditional corporate communities to a set of place I call creative centers
2. The creative centers tend to be the economic winners of our age. They also show strong signs of overall regional vitality such as increases in regional employment and population
3. The creative centers are not thriving for such traditional economic reasons as access to natural resources or transportation routes. Creative centers provide the integrated eco-system or habitat where all forms of creativity - artistic, and cultural, technological and economic - can take root and flourish
4. Creative people are not moving to these places for traditional reasons. What they look for in communities are abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of all kinds and above all else the opportunity to validate their identities as creative people.

Creative capital theory says that regional economic growth is driven by the location choice of creative people who prefers places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas. It thus differs from the human capital theory into two respects.

1. It identifies a type of human capital, creative people as being key to economic growth
2. It identifies the underlying factors that shape the location decisions of these people, instead of merely saying that regions are blessed with certain endowments of them.

Great city has two hallmarks: tolerance for strangers and intolerance for mediocrity - These are precisely the qualities that appeal to members of creative class. Places are also valued for authenticity and uniqueness. Authenticity comes from several aspects of a community - historic building, established neighborhoods, a unique music scene or special cultural attributes. Music is a key part of what makes a place authentic. Music in facts plays a central role in the creation of identity and the formation of real communities. Sounds, songs and musical memories are some of the strongest and most easily evoked.

Cities are now favorite for the people for the following reasons

1. Crime is down and cities are safer

2. Cities have become the prime location for the creative lifestyle and the new amenities that go with it.

3. Cities are benefiting from powerful demographic shifts (more people staying singles than married)and urban centers server lifestyle centers and as mating markets for single people

4. Cities have reemerged as centers of creativity and incubators of innovation

5. The current round of urban revitalization is giving rise to serious tensions between established neighborhood residents and newer more affluent people moving in

6. Both sprawling cities and traditional suburbs are seeking to emulate elements of urban life.

Place provides an increasingly important dimension of our identity. The combination of where we live and what we do has come to replace who we work for as a main element of identity. Qualities of the place are defined by these three KPIs.

1. What is there
2. Who is there
3. What is going on

One of the great remaining puzzle of urban economic and regional analysis resolved around Zipf’s law and that says that the distribution of virtually all cities within a nation follows a simple ‘power law’: the basic idea being that the second largest city is roughly half the size of the largest; the third roughly one-third of the size and so on. This law accurately describes all the other advanced industrial nations.

While the university is a key institution of the creative economy, to be effective contributor to regional growth, the university must play three interrelated roles that reflect the 3Ts of creative places - technology, talent and tolerance.

The challenge before the creative class is a toll order. Mancur Olson noted in his classic book ‘The logic of collective action’, those who organize around discrete goals with sustained effort have a great advantage over those who have strong interests but are diffuse and disorganized. The creative class in my view has three fundamental issues to address
1. Investing in creativity to ensure long-run economic growth
2. Overcoming the class divides that weaken our social fabric and threaten economic well-being
3. Building new forms of social cohesion in a world defined by increasing diversity and beset by growing fragmentation.

Book referred in this book
Organization man - William Whyte & Jabe Jacobs
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Joseph Schumpeter.
The social life of information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
The Death and life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacob
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
the wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The experience economy by Jospeh Pine and James Gilmore
Bohemian versus Bourgeois by Cesar Grana.
One market under God by Frank Bemoans
The logic of collective action by Mancur Olson

The future of success - Robert B. Reich

2012-01-14T16:19:00.002-05:00

The future of success - Robert B. Reich

[A scholarly book from a Rhodes Scholar].

In the preindustrial era, craftsman made almost everything to order but this was expensive. Then came mass-production as the scale of production increases, the cost of each item produced plummeted. But the logic of mass production dictated sameness. In order to ensure a profit, mass producers had to invest up front and then predict how many identical items could be sold and at what price. All this effort to quarantine a large and stable market for what was mass-produced, consumers got many more things, more cheaply. Mass production begot mass marketing which whetted appetites for more mass consumption which in turn enlarged the system of mass production. But choices were limited in order to reap the full efficiencies of large scale and products did not change much from one year to the next.

The emerging system is starkly different. Increasingly digital technologies now enable sellers to tailor products to particular buyers while still keeping production costs down. There is no need to guarantee a large stable market for every item. Economies of production scale still matter, but less than they did. Nimble businesses now jump into new markets, because they don’t need large production scale to succeed. The age of the terrific deal comes with a catch; here lies the dilemma of our time.

As societies become richer and as technology makes all sorts of things more affordable and accessible, an ever-larger portion of personal income will be spent on insatiable wants that extended infinitely beyond bare needs. It is in the domain that you can expect the economy to grow and future jobs to multiply.

Types of Job fields that will increase
Health related jobs
Entertainment
Attractiveness to others
intellectual stimulation
Contact (Social networking)
Contact Family well-being
Financial security

Jospeh Alois Schumpeter was a professor economics (during WWI) and in his ‘Theory of Economic development, he conceived of a world in which entrepreneur played crucial role. Unless entrepreneur feel threatened by new competition, they will have no incentive to continue to innovate. Economies, therefore cannot progress without the gales of creative destruction.

Consider that you are selling your product well in the market which will soon have comparative competition and in order to keep up the market share, what are the usual strategy.
1. Cut costs, but it has its limits
2. Improve product that require R/D
3. Replace with a new product which is the costliest and riskiest option.
If you do well at this game - keeping price down, adding value and keep inventing - you can keep up the market share. You need to do non-stop efforts the economy is brimming with innovation.

In this new economy, customers have vast choice that keep widening and it is easier for buyers to switch and a get a better deal.

Need for Geeks and Shrinks

At the core of innovation lay two distinct personalities, representing different inclinations, and talents. The first is that of the artist’s or inventor – a Geek. In short, a person who is capable of seeing new possibilities in a particular medium and who takes delight in exploring and developing them.

(When the geek bestows his highest accolade on some software - that is cool. It is cool because it is original, authentic, beautiful; it has crossed a conventional boundary and solved problem or it can perform an operation that no one had previously thought of etc. When more people wanted this cool solution, it become a hot thing as the demand is more than supply can provide)

The second personality is a person who can identify people’s possible wants and latent desires - desires that even those people may not have been fully aware of possessing, desires for products that even do not yet exist.

The geek draws on his endless fascination with a medium and the shrink by contrast draws on her fascination with people - their aspirations, and fears, their yearning and needs, their unexamined assumptions. The shrink is empathetic where the geek is analytic. Geeks understand ‘it’ and shrink understand ‘them’.

The greatest threat to freedom of speech in many modern societies comes not from overt controls by oppressive regimes but from a more fiercely competitive market in which buyers can so easily switch to whatever they find more satisfying. Such a marketplace dictates with increasing ferocity what will be written, broadcast, and researched. The public, deluged with what delights it and protected from what may cause it discomfort, is thus armored against what it may need to know.

The demand for creative workers - both geeks and shrinks- will continue to grow because they are the masters of innovation and innovation lies at the heart of the new economy. As these competition increases, it is fueling even greater demand for the services of such creative workers. These jobs therefore are likely to pay increasingly well. They also are likely to be intellectually or artistically engaging, emotionally absorbing, personally satisfying and sometimes boundlessly frustrating.

Since the early nineties, the income of people at or near the top have grown twice as fast as of people in the middle. These changes have large consequences. The rich and the middle class are now living in parallel universe and the poors are almost invisible to both.

(Milton Garland who at the age of 102 was America’s oldest known wage earner who had worked for the same firm - Frick Company of Waynesboro, PA- for 78 years since joi9ning it in 1920)

It is very often there are only two tracks - fast and slow. for professionals managers and geeks/shrinks of all kinds, keeping up to speed is now a necessity. Markets and technologies are changing so rapidly that you need to be totally involved in order to keep up. If you are on a slow track, you fall further and further behind. You may have a difficult time ever getting back on the fast track. In short, the new economy that compels people to work harder.

Business looking to hire are placing greater reliance on referrals from people they trust for the same reason that trustworthy brand portals are becoming more important to buyers who are drowning in information and need guidance as to what is good. The vast powerful network of Ivy League college is a supplement to those referrals.

Money does corrupt politics and the current system stinks, but to think about it in terms of purchasing specific policies or pieces of legislation misses the real corruption.

Here is how it works: A wealthy individual receives an invitation to be with powerful politician and that connection will be then extended to wealthy business friends and in the long turn, politicians spend more time with wealthy people than common people. The access that the politician provides the wealthy and the access that the politician thereby gains to the ever-expanding network of money reinforce each other. Increasingly politician hears the same kinds of suggestions, the same voicing of concerns and priorities.

In the old economy, you got ahead by being well liked. Self-help books solemnly advise on how to win friends and influence people and the successful ‘organization man’ was accepted by all. Arthur Miller’s ‘Willy Loman advises his sons how to success: “Be liked and you will never want”, he says. “The wonder of this country is that a man can end with diamonds on the basis of being liked:” Davis Riseman - the eminent sociologist of midcentury American- said” Thus all power... is in the hands of the actual or imaginary approving group”.

The new Divide: If you or your children don’t have the right innate talents, education and connections to make it into the creative sector of the economy - devising and selling designs, concepts, plans, strategies, deals and insights - chances are that you will end up selling personal attention, because that’s the other arena where job growth is occurring. But those jobs unproductive and are not so rewarding due to many reasons. It is given one-on-one service where as a software engineer’s creation can be sold to many people and hence more rewarding. Secondly, these jobs are not valued in the society.

Community as commodity: Local services in private residential communities are supported by membership dues. Private residential communities exclude large families that need a lot of schools and social services and whose children may be noisy or engage in pretty crime, by charging hefty prices for homes and high membership fees and by strictly limiting the number of bedrooms in each unit. Citizens movement against state and local taxes have been spearheaded by private homeowner associations whose members see no reason why they should pay to support families outside the gates when members are getting everything they need inside through their dues.

In the emerging economy, success will depend most on talent, ingenuity, the ability to sell oneself and connections. The quality of a child’s early education and the character of the child’s community are centrally important in these respects.

The old job of leadership was to make decision and the new job of leadership is to attract (and keep) money and talent. This is because money and talent are more mobile than ever. Private-sector executives no longer make big strategic decisions. Their time is spent reassuring stock analyst, VC and institutional investors about the enterprise’s rosy future and persuading valued individuals to come or to stay by enticing them with stock options and interesting projects.

Same in government sectors: Governors and mayors must also persuade business to come and to stay by providing tax reduction and other subsidizes. Worse, the tax breaks and subsidies offere3d to business come at the expense of public services needed by many of these areas ‘less fortunate people, like good schools. Owner of Yankees is demanding that NYC build the team new multimillion-dollar stadium (otherwise, they will leave) and the mayor obliged to their demand at the expense of poor schools and communities where they starved of funds. When the Yankee team leave, they leave with all other revenues that it generate to the city and the poor inner-city kids will never go as they have no way to go.

How changes in technology and the economy are alerting how work is organized and rewarded which in turn influence how you lead your life.

1. Your earnings are less predictable than they were before. You work harder when the work is available against the risk that your income may drop in the future.

2 If your skills are in great demand, you are likely to be paid more than were people near the top of the income ladder in the old system. Some of the work is satisfying, perhaps even ennobling; much of it is difficult or frustrating.

3. If your job is not rewarding you have to work harder to prop up your family’s income and your spouse may be working long hours as well. If your job is rewarding category, you may want to work longer and harder too - you’d be giving up far more than you’d have given up making the same choice years ago.

4. Even if you are doing well, you’ve got to continue to hustle. The market and technology is changing very fast and you need to keep up the fast changing landscape

5. You are no longer in a big organization that will steadily promote you up the ranks because you do your job completely and well. You have got to attract and keep customers and increase your market value.

6. You will have less time to spend with your loved ones as you will be busy to keep up your fast job life.

The sorting mechanism is becoming even more efficient. If you work hard, sell yourself effectively and do well, you will be able to pool your winning with others who have done well.

Old job type is not coming back rather debate the large trade-offs, we are engaged in at least three separate conversations.

1. The first is breathlessly enthusiastic one about the wonders of the new economy. That economy’s terrific deals are real and will vastly improve those aspects of our lives that can be enhanced by what we buy.

2. The second conversion is a fearful one, about the dangers and depredations of unfretted capitalism, the power or greed of global corporations and international finance and sometimes the encroachments of immigrants, foreigners and ethnic minorities

3. The third conversation is private one, about the difficulties of achieving a balanced life in this new era. As we work harder and sell ourselves more intensely as we adopt the market -directed (have the courage to be rich) ethos of our age, many of us are anxious about what’s becoming of our families our friendships, our broader communities and even more innermost selves.

These three separate conversations are different responses to the same set of phenomena. Some of us might even be engaged in all three conversations simultaneously without seeing the connections between them. We may delight in the terrific deals we can obtain while we also fret about what seem like encroachments by global corporations’ trade and immigrants, and at the same time worry about personal demands our work is exacting from the rest of our lives. But if we are to deal effectively with the larger trade-off before us, we must understand the connections between these three conversations.

Masters of Management by Adrian Wooldridge

2011-12-28T12:06:00.003-05:00

Masters of Management by Adrian Wooldridge
How the business gurus and their ideas have changed the world - for better and for worse

[Book reveals stars of the business gurus and their books and relevance; but later part of the book is a repetition that we could see in any management books with same old examples].

As per Drucker, objectives are not fate, but they are direction.
C. Montgomery Burns advised on succeeding in business: "I will keep it short and sweet. Family, religion and Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business"

The breadth of the management industry spread across three categories: The first part that makes the other two possible, consists of business schools. The second category is management consulting business (McKinney, Accenture, Capgemeni, Boston Consulting group, etc) and the third category is guru business - the whirligig of book writing and lecture-giving that is associated with names like Gary Hamel and Jim Collins.

Often, the gurus offer the illusion that for all the complexities of the world, the answers are really rather straightforward, provided the guru is one's guide. Gurus of every stripe have tried to reduce world's complexities to simple phrases ('Core competencies', the five forces, six trends, three Cs (commitment, creativity and competition) etc.

Drucker says in 'Practice of management' that the most powerful as well as most lasting contribution America has made to Western thoughts since the Federalist papers. Gary Hamel seconded this statement by saying, " The machinery of management - which encompasses variance analysis, capital budgeting, project management, pay-for-performance, strategic planning and the like - amounts to one of humanity's greatest inventions".

Peter Drucker: The Guru's guru.
He was one of the few thinkers from any discipline who can claim to have changed the world: he was inventor of privatization, the apostle of a new class of knowledge workers, the champion of management as a serious intellectual discipline and a confidante to the world corp. elite. His last book is 'The effective executive in action'. He was credited with 'moving 75-80% of the Fortune 500 to radical decentralization". The concept of corporation (his third book) was an unashamedly passionate plea for GM to treat labor as a resource rather than just a cost center. Durcker insisted that industrial relations ought to be based on people's desire to be engaged in their job and proud of their product and he is opponent of assembly-line mentality. Druckers enthusiasm for empowerment was reinforced by his belief that the old industrial proletariat was being replaced by knowledge workers.

Drucker invented one of the rational schools of management's most successful products, 'management by objectives (MBO) an approach that dominated 'strategic thinking in the postwar decades. Organization is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of business performance and business results. Org structure must be designed so as to make possible the achievement of the objectives of the business five, ten fifteen years...

However he did not created a single area of academic management theory like Michael Porter did with strategy and Theodore Levitt did with marketing. His most famous quotations," Management is the organ of institutions - the organ that converts a mob into an organization and human efforts into performance"

Some of the countries made breakthrough into sustained growth is not because they discovered new technologies but because they invented new organization.

Tom Peters: management for the masses.

The most important sentence in the English language? I love you.
"May I clean your glasses, Sir" could be the depth of service offering. His best book 'In search of excellence' advances three arguments against the rationalist model. First. the model puts too much emphasis on financial analysis and too little on motivating workers or satisfying customers. Second, the rationalist model encouraged bureaucratic conformity at the expense of entrepreneurial innovation. Rationalist managers believe that big is best, because it brings economics of scale, that messiness is disastrous, because it means waste and confusion and that the planning is essential because it means waste and confusion and that planning is essential. Third, the rationalist model rests on a misunderstanding of human nature.

Since 2000, the management theory business has been revolutionized by the arrival of two new kinds of practitioners: journo-gurus from the world of 'big media' and academic entrepreneurs from the what business school professors might well regard as the wrong side of the tracks.

Journo-Gurus:

The kings of the great journo-gurus are Tom Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell and Christopher Anderson. If Friedman's talent is making sense of the most momentous development of our time, globalization, Gladwell's is for forcing us to take a fresh look at some of the commonplace of our daily lives that look not only exotic, and fascinating. Anderson's big idea was that we are moving from a world of big hits to a world of niche products. Technological innovation is removing bottlenecks in distribution that forced companies to focus on a few products. The era of one-size-fits-all is ending and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes.

Academic Entrepreneurs:

Richard Florida: Accenture put him in third place of management gurus (Michael Porter, Tom Peters, Richard Florida and Peter Drucker) where as WSJ put him into 7th place. In 'the future of success', Reich argued that we live in the age of the terrific deal. Choices are almost limitless and a better deal is always waiting around the corner, a wonderful situation for the consumer but a much more problematic one for the producer. Workers have to market themselves in order to avoid obsolescence by elephantiasis. In the age of terrific deal, economics of attention replace economics of scale as the currency of business success. What matters is the ability to attract people's attention and then to create the 'stickiness' that is the closes thing the modern world has to loyalty. If 'attention must be paid' as Willy Lomand said, the price of commanding it is endless self-publicity. In 'Supercaptialism, Reich argued that today's turbo-charged capitalism is at the same time both generating profound social problems and using its political muscle to prevent those problems from being solved. He argued that the people who are driving supercapatilism are not greedy CEOs, but you and me. Consumers are putting relentless pressure on companies to improve their quality and cut their cost.

Richard Florida: a specialist on urban studies and his carrier making book - The rise of creative class: And how it is transforming work, leisure and everyday life is an odd mixture of Michael Young's 'Rise of Meritocracy' and Candace Bushnell's 'Sex in the city'. As per him, cities that currently attract companies with lower taxes, should attract creative people instead

Howard Gardner: has been professor at Harvard for forty years. And he is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences. He argued that intelligence could be subdivided into several different types and that people who did poorly in one activity might excel in another. He argued that people who lack a command of one or more of these mental disciplines will have hard time of it(from his book - five minds for the future - disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful and ethical),. People who cannot synthesize will be overwhelmed by information; People who cannot create will be replaced by machines. People who lack ethics will destroy their org and eventually themselves. People who refused to respect others will poison their surroundings.

New collection of building blocks:
1. Core competencies (ref# C.K. Prahalad & Gary Hamel)
2. Renewal
3. Networking
4. Culture

Books referred in this book

"What If the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team Read Drucker's Management", by Natsumi Iwaski
Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices by Peter Drucker
The witch doctor by Adrian Wooldridge & John M
In search of excellence by Tom Peters
The rise of the creative class : and how it's transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life by Florida, Richard L.
The future of success by Robert Reich Creating minds by Howard Gardner
In leading minds by Howard Gardner
Five minds for the future by Howard Gardner
Guru questions books:
Fad Surfing in the Boardroom: managing in the Age of Instant Answers by Eileen Shapiro
Dangerous company: The consulting powerhouses and the business they save and ruin by James O'Shea and Charles Madigan
The halo effect by Phil Rosenzweig
The management myth: debunking the modern business philosophy by Mathew Stewart

Willpower by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney.

2011-12-27T20:39:00.004-05:00

Willpower by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney.
Rediscovering the greatest human strength.

[As per the authors, intelligence is set at the time of birth and the only thing that a human can control/change is his self-control to reach higher heights]

Charles Darwin wrote in 'The Descent of man' "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts'.

The most commonly resisted desire in the beeper study was the urge to eat, followed by the urge to sleep and then by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking emails and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music or watching TV.

The right smile makes people feel good about you, says Dale Carnegie. 'The basic factor in psychology is the realizable wish' Peale wrote: "The man who assumes success tends already to have success". Believe it achieve it.

We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts. Another broad category is the control of emotions, which psychologist call affect regulations when it's focused specifically on mood. More commonly, we are trying to escape from bad moods and unpleasant thoughts. A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, etc. The fourth category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task in hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, preserving when you feel like quitting.

Intake of glucose directly increases willpower. The old advice about eating a good breakfast applies all day long, particularly on days when you are physically or mentally stressed. To maintain steady self-control, you are better off eating foods with a low glycerin index: mostly vegetables, nuts, many raw fruits, cheese, fish, meats, olive oil, and other food fats.

Willpower 101:
1. Know your limits. Your supply of willpower is limited and you use the same resources for many different things.
2. Watch for symptoms. To avoid succumbing to irrational biases and lazy shortcuts articulate your reasons for your decisions and consider whether they make sense.
3. Pick your battles. When you pick you battle, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective.
4. Make a to-do list or at least not-to-do-list
5, Beware the planning fallacy One way to avoid the planning fallacy is to force yourself to think about your past.
6. Don't forget the basics. For example, self-control will be most effective if you take good basic care of your body, starting with diet and sleep.
7. The power of positive procrastination. Benchley wrote:"The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment". Procrastination typically avoids one task by doing something else and rarely do they sit there doing nothing at all.
8. The nothing alternative (for example If I can't write, I will do nothing"
9. Keep track - monitoring is crucial for any kind of plan you make.
10. Reward often

Few Books mentioned in this book:
Dale Carnegie - How to win friends and influence people
Norman Vincent Peale's The power of positive thinking
Napoleon Hill's Think and grow rich
Baumeister and Dianne Tice 's Losing Control (scholarly book?)

A hand-list of Rhetorical Terms by Richard A. Lanham.

2011-11-20T10:45:00.002-05:00

A hand-list of Rhetorical Terms by Richard A. Lanham.

[I only picked topics & sentences that are interested to me; meaning this is not review of the book. This is a very good reference book for anyone who opt for public debate]

One of four levels or senses of interpretation common in medieval and Renaissance exegesis.
a. literal, b. allegorical, c. moral ,d. spiritual.

The letter teaches the deed, the allegory what you believe, the moral what you should do, the spiritual what you strive for.

(the western political satires, quasiphilosphical anatomies, personal attacks in epigrammatic form, pastorals of all sorts, apocalyptic visions, encyclopedia epics... naturalistic much-raking novels whose aim is to propagandize social change, imaginary voyages, detective stories fairy tales debate poems...

Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fitness, freeness
yea, to such surging, swaying, sighing, swelling, shrinking

Consonance & assonance
Guard and guide

For your bro and my sis no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage.

Goods of life rather than the good life.

The passion is all that man can know of God: his conflicts, duly faced are all that he can know of himself. The last judgment is the always present self-judgment (Erickson)

Positive statement made in a negative forum

I wasted time and now doth time waste me...

I ask you of cheese, you answer me of chalk
He was a modest man, with much to be modest about..

A proposition is true if it has not been proved false

tiny, timid, tentative tardy

I am gonna squeeze your lemon baby, till the good juice comes...

Logicians distinguish four:
material (e.g. the metal which is a card is made),
formal (design of car)
efficient (assembling of the car)
final (purpose of the car - transportation)

if you stay in Beverly hills too long, you become a Mercedes... (Robert Redford)

Anyone who thinks he has ha solution does not comprehend the problem and anyone who comprehends the problem does not have a solution -

The Q is not whether Grape Nuts are good enough for you, it's whether you are good enough for Grape Nuts

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going..

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is nor original and the part that is original is not good...

pregnant sentence or maxim, often illustrated by an anecdote.

this wine may be verified that merry induction, that good wine makes good blood, good blood causeth good humors, good humors cause good thoughts, good thoughts bring forth good works, good works carry a man to heaven, ergo good wine carry a man to heaven.

A crocodile having seized a woman's son, said that he would restore him, if she would the truth. She replied, you will not restore him. Was it the crocodile's duty to give him up?
(The barber shaves only those men in town who do not shave themselves.
All this seems perfectly logical, until we pose the paradoxical question:
Who shaves the barber?)
Careless she is with artful care,
Affecting to seem unaffected." _Congreve

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

As far as Urdu is concerned Mirza Asad ullah Khan Ghalib appears to be the greatest exponent of paradoxical language. Some of his gems are given below. Only first part of the verse is given in the interest of brevity.
1. Mushkilain itni parein kay asaan ho gaien.
So many troubles I got that they become my comfort!
2. Aadmi ko bhe mayyassar nahin Insan hona
Even a man is not able to become human!
3. Tangiay dil ka gila kiya yeh woh kafir dil hai
Why complain about heartlessness, the heart is heathen
4. Jatay hoiy kehto ho qiamat ko mialaingay
kiya khoob qiamat ka hai goya koi din aur
To part saying that will meet again on dooms day,
Well that is enough to make it a dooms day,
6. Qata keejiay na tallauq hum say
kuch nahin to adawat hee sahee
Do not sever all relationship with us
If nothing else let there be acrimony

Emphasizing a strong point by repeating it several times in different words
(e.g. expelled, thrust out, banished and cast away from the city..)

Repetition of a word or words in succeeding clauses
1. for amplification or emphasize
e.g.you are promoting riots, Garica, yes, civil and internal riots

2. to express emotion
e.g. you were not moved when his mother embraced your knees? you were not moved?

Repetition of a word with one or a few words in between , used to express strong emotion
e.g. My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed..

Use of different verbs to express similar ideas in successive clauses
e.g. By the roman people, Numantia was destroyed, Carthage razed, Corinth demolished, Fregellae overthrown...

To muse in mind how faire, how wise, how good
how brave, how free, how courteous, and how true
MY lady is doth but inflame my blood

Fallacy two types – formal & informal

A. Fallacies of relevance
Argumentum ad baculum – appeal to force
Argumentum ad hominen – disparage character of the speaker, instead of attacking his arguments
Argumentum ad ignorantiam – argue that a proposition is true because it has never been proved false
Argumentum ad misericordiam – appeal to pity
Argumentum ad populum – play on the feelings of the audience
Argumentum ad verecundiam – appeal to traditional values
Converse accident – fallacious generalization on the basis of unrepresentative sample
Post hoc, propter hoc (because A occurs before B, A is the cause of B: confusion of temporal and causal sequence
Petitio principia – assuming as a premise the conclusion to be proved – begging the question
Rigged question – the terms of the question require admission as part of any answer: Have you stopped beating your wife (indirectly says he beats his wife)
Ignoratio elenchi – an argument which proves a conclusion different from the one intended

B. Fallacies of ambiguity
Equivocation – deliberate confusion of two or more meanings of a word
Amphiboly – argument from grammatically ambiguous premise
Accent – change of stress or emphasis to change meaning
Composition – taking a part for the whole
Division – taking the whole for a part

The Laws of Thought
1. Principle of Identity - if a statement is true, it is true
2. Principle of contradiction - no statement can be both true and false
3. Principle of excluded middle - any statement must be either true or false

Metaphor - changing a word from its literal meaning to one not properly applicable but analogous to it.
We are naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily: words express ideas and therefore those words are the most agreeable that enables us to get hold of new ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh - Aristotle.

Occultatio - emphasizing something by pointedly seeming to pass over it as in introducing a guest speaker one says, " I will not dwell here on the 20 book she has written nor his 40 years as dean nor his many illustrious pupils, but only say that last year he did xyz.."

Subtle speaking, quibbling.
e.g. I rise to commit an irregularity. The intervention I make is without precedent and the reason for that intervention is also without precedent and the fact that the reason for my intervention is without precedent is the reason why I must ask for a precedent for my intervention" - Churchill.

Rhetoric

Three branches of Rhetoric - Deliberate, Judicial & Ceremonial
Five parts - Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory & Delivery

Invention - two kinds of proof - In-artificial & Artificial
Artificial has three types - Ethos, Pathos & Logos

Two types of logical proof
Deductive - Syllogism & Enthymeme
Inductive -

Two kinds of topic
1. Topics useful in a special area of knowledge only
2. Topics useful in arguments of all kinds
a. What can and cannot happen
b. What has and has not happened
c. What will or will not happen
d. Size

28 valid topics
1. Restate your contention in an opposite way (e.g. instead of saying 'excess is bad' say moderation is good. If the opposite statement holds, so will the original one
2. Redefine a key term slightly to support your contention or suggest a synonym that seems better to support it
3. Use a correlative idea. You want to prove B justly punished so prove A just in punishing him
4. Argue a fortiori. Prove A has acted in a cruel way at one time by showing that at another he acted still more cruelly
5. Argue from circumstances of past time. What has been promised at one time must be performed at another, even though times and circumstances may have changed
6. Turn an accusation against accuser. The implied moral superiority of the accuser is this attacked
7. Define your terms so as to place the argument in a favorable light
8. Play upon various senses of a word
9. Divide your argument into its logical parts
10. Argue from plain induction (parallel cases)
11. Argue from authority or previous verdict
12. Argue your contention part by part
13. Argue from consequences, good or bad
14. When an action may have good or bad consequences, invert your opponent's arguments. Aristotle example: Don't take up oratory. If you say truth, men will hate you; if you lie, the Gods will hate you. Take up oratory. If you lie, men will love you; if you say the truth, the Gods will love you.
15. Oppose an argument by seeming to allow it and then maintaining that things are not what they seem. If the opponent maintains thus, argue things are what they seem.
16. Argue from logical consequences. If a man is old enough to fight for his country, he is old enough to vote. Are we then to say that those too sick to fight should not vote?
17. Argue that if two results are the same, their causes must be the same
18. Apply an opponent's earlier decision to later case, to his disadvantage
19. Take the possible motive for the one actually prevailing
20. In arguing individual motive, point to general motives or prohibitions (for or against, depending on which side you have taken)
21. Make people believe an improbability by pointing to an even greater one that is yer true.
22. Catch your opponent out on inaccuracies and self-contradictions
23. Refute slander by showing that it was evoked by a mistaken view of the facts
24. Prove effect by showing the presence of its cause or vice-versa
25. Show that a client or a cause had better argument and failed to use it. Only trustful innocence would make such a mistake
26. Disprove an action by showing it inconsistent with previous actions
27. Use previous mistakes as a defense (or explanation) for present ones
28. Support an argument by playing upon the meaning of names (Mr. Stern is a harsh man)

Ten invalid topics or fallacies of arguments
1. Conclude an argument, as if at the end of a reasoning process, without having gone, through the process
2. Play on illogical, fortuitous similarity of words (A sauce pan must be noble for so was the great god Pan)
3. Make statement about the whole that is true only of individual parts or vice versa
4. Use indignant language
5. Use a single, unrepresentative example
6. Take the accidental as essential
7. Argue from consequence
8. Argue post hoc, ergo propter hoc
9. Ignore crucial circumstances
10. Suggest, from fraudulent confusion of general and particular that the improbable is probable and vice versa

Thesis & Hypotheses

Thesis- a general argument, one that does not deal with particular case

Hypothesis - argument about a particular case and there are two divisions
1. Question of fact or justice
2. Question of law

Hypothesis has seven elements
1. Actor
2. Action
3. Time
4. Place
5.Cause
6. Manner
7. Starting point

Arrangement: The parts of an Oration

To avoid the unnecessary confusion of overlapping classifications, there are six basic steps according to the well known discussion in Rhetoric ad Herennum

1. Exordium - catches the audience attention
2. Narration - sets forth the facts
3. Division - sets forth points stipulated and points to be contested
4. Proof - sets forth the arguments that support one's case
5. Refutation - refutes opponent arguments
6. Peroration - sums up arguments and stirs audience.

Aristotle saw two essential elements - the statement of the issue (narration) and the arguments for & against it. At most he thought, an introduction and conclusion framing the two essential parts would make a total of four. a. ingratiating introduction, b. state your case, c. prove your case, d.sum up in an ingratiating way.

If there is any characteristic form to be found among the various schemes for the parts, it would seem to be a strategy of alternating emotional and evidential appeals, first cultivating the good will of hearers and then setting forth the facts of the case.

Simplest structure - states your case, and proves it
First complication: Encapsulate this statement with emotional appeals fore and aft
Second complication: Interrupt the factual statement with one or more emotional appeals
Third complication: Divide your argumentation into subsections
Da Capo: More interpolated emotional appeals and argumentative subdivisions

Style

Three types
1. The low or plain style (unornamented - brief style)
2. The middle style (somewhere between 1 &3)
3. The grand style (ornamented style - full style)

The Greek Demetrius offers four divisions
Plan, Grand, Elegant & Forceful

Memory
There are two types - natural & artificial. Artificial memory is trained using one of the 'memory-theater.

Delivery
Two parts - voice and gesture and these were variously and greatly subdivided.
Read the following for Delivery
Non-verbal communication by Robert A Hinde
Elizabethan Acting by L. Joseph
Chirologia or the natural language of the hands by John Bulwer (1644)1
Chironomia by Gilbert Austin (1806)
Essay on elocution and pronunciation by John Mason (1748)
Practical illustration of Rhetorical gesture and action by Henry Siddons

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/paradox-examples-in-literature.html
Below are copied from the above site

You can save money by spending it.

"I can resist anything but temptation."-Oscar Wilde
"I must be cruel to be kind."
We must go to war to make peace.
Extreme rationalism, by 'seeing through' all 'rational' motives, leaves us creatures of wholly irrational behavior. – C. S. Lewis
Each new power won by man (over nature) is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. – C. S. Lewis
To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting. – King Stanislaw II
Freedom is not doing what you want, freedom is wanting to do what you have to do…this kind of freedom is always rooted in practiced habit. – Northrop Frye

`Nobody asked your opinion,' said Alice.
`Who's making personal remarks now?' the Hatter asked triumphantly.

'You won't marry me because I'm crazy, and you say I'm crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?'

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."

"Men work together whether they work together or apart." - The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - Animal Farm by George Orwell

Alliteration Examples in Advertising Slogans:
"Don't dream it. Drive it."
- Jaguar
"Dream. Dare. Do."
- Girl Guides

"Functional... Fashionable... Formidable..."
- Fila

How to click with people by Dr. Rick Kirschner

2011-11-19T09:06:00.002-05:00

How to click with people by Dr. Rick Kirschner
(The secret to better relationships in business and in life)

The Basic Click:
The power of resonance
Patterns of similarity
Blending ( reducing diff between yourself & someone else to create a resonant pattern of similarity)
Treat each person equally
Be attentive
Treat people with warmth. There are several ways to convey warmth.
1. Move. Warmth comes across when your body seems undefended. Maintain a relaxed and open posture, whether you are in a casual setting or a formal one. Face people, but not straight on (at first) - turn toward them at a slight angle. Once they have had a chance to get comfortable with you, move so you interact completely face-to-face.

2. Welcome people into your space rather than invade theirs. When you enter a room, survey it before entering. When your eyes kind on someone, let your attention linger long enough to let individuals actually notice you noticing them, then smile - and give them a chance to respond in kind. A small smile with a stranger creates warmth, whereas an overpowering smile can intimidate those who feel distant already

3. Position yourself when someone starts to talk with you, take note of how much space she takes up and respond accordingly. Beware of her personal space and move just to the edge of it, but never beyond.
4. Look at people. No matter how near or far you are, let people see warmth in your eyes. Focus on the person you are interacting with - your gaze should not be scouting around as if for a better opportunity. If her eyes are slightly averted, you do the same and if she is gazing steadily at you, you do the same.

5. Speak - Let people hear the warmth in your voice. Use a friendly and helpful tone in what you say. The best way to convey warmth with your voice is to relax when you speak. A warm voice is easy on the ears because it sounds relaxed.
6. Attend to people. Hold the other person at the center of your attention.

There are three things you can know about people before they every say a word.
1. They love to hear themselves talk
2. They want to be heard and understood
3. They are drawn to people who listen to them

connected listening - look like you understand and sound like you understand
backtracking - talk like you understand
Ask the right questions (stupid q vs dumb q)
Start with open ended Qs - who, what, where, when & how? (not why)
Ask for relevancy
Introduce information as question
Ask for intent
Ask even if you already know
Tell me more …
Listen for feelings, not just words

Click in Style -
To build connection with people, you need to understand four basic styles of communication - action, accuracy, approval and appreciation. If you are speaking to a person who is after accuracy above all else, you are going to miss the mark if your focus is on praising her, for example.

Action-based communication sounds like:
'make it happen'
get it done
Stop beating around the bush
follow through

Helpful phrases for the action click
I want to tell you about....
here is where I am going with this..
Consider this...
You can...
Let me get right into the point...
Moving right along...
What is the bottom line...
The faster things move forward, the better this person will respond to you

Accuracy-based communication sounds like:
After considering they many variables...
There are many facts to consider...
Before proceeding a careful analysis might yield

Helpful phrases for the accuracy click
Something worthy of discussions is
It is reasonable to explore the various ways
when broke down into its components parts..
There are lots of reasons to take into account...

Approval based communication sounds like:
Is this good time?
Is there something you want to tell me?
What do you think
I feel like you really are doing a great job?

Helpful phrases for the approval click..
You and I..
what do you think we should do
how do you feel about our choices
here is what this will mean to us
everyone's on board
do you mind
is this a good time

Appreciation based communication sounds like:
I feel we ought to do this, and I tell you why
I've given this a lot of thought, because it is important to me..
I can see that if I were to do this, I would
I feel strongly about this, I hope you will listen to me

Helpful phrases for the appreciation click:
I noticed how you
I love the way you
How do you
can you show me
what do you think
help me with something?

Most communication problem come down to mismatched styles..

Motivation comes down to how a person answers these fundamental Qs. What is it for me and what should I care?

The six types of motivation
Values
Reward
Challenge
Esteem
Purpose
Feelings

click via phone
when building connection over the phone, you have eight key tools in your toolbox, most of which involve a form of blending.
1. Make sure the timing is right (Is this a good time to talk or would you prefer I call back at another time)

2. Use the person's name to hold attention

3. Match voice volume
4. Reconcile talking speed
5. Conform your speaking rhythm to your partners
6. Match energy
7. Level vocal variety (use a similar variety of tones and you will find it easier to get and maintain click)
8.. Keep sentence length and word choice similar.

Four ways to click during a phone interview
1. Use a landline
2. Be prepared
3. Hold the focus
4. Listen and blend

Eight ways to Click using email.
1. Be polite
2. Use the subject line
3. Keep it brief
4. Frame your message
5. Put out any flames
6. Only send to groups with permission
7. When sending to ground, keep addresses private
8. Watch the funny stuff

Troubleshooting (turn personal problems to personal relationship)
1. It is not about you
2. Ask yourself if it could be about you

7 Emotional click signals
Affinity, comparison, conformity, reciprocity, authority, consistency, and scarcity

You click with people you find attractive
you click with charismatic people
you click with those who treat with you with respect.
you click with what people you like

7 ways to send the signal of authority
1. Carry yourself with authority
2. speak from experience
3. dress for success
4. emphasis your credentials
5. accept responsibility
6. involve other authorities
7. be the authority

You click with people when you know you can count on them
you click with people when you fulfill their positive expectations

Signal of scarcity
you click when people make you feel special
you click when the moment is fleeting
Keep confidence
Speak in confidence
create a sense of exclusivity
embody qualities in short supply in today's world
offer something not easy to get

Make your point
Keep it short and simple
Put the most important info at front
be specific
don't tell them everything
focus on goals not process
choose familiar words

Hopes and prospects by Noam Chomsky

2011-10-30T21:10:00.006-04:00

Hopes and prospects by Noam Chomsky.

At the time of European conquests, China and India were the world's major commercial and industrial centers, well ahead of Europe. England was trying to catch up in textiles and other manufactures, borrowing from India and other countries in ways that are now called 'piracy' and are banned in the international trade agreements imposed by the rich states under a cynical pretense of 'free trade'.

England adopted a form of 'free trade' in 1946 after centuries of protectionism and state intervention in the economy had given it an enormous advantage over competitors while it destroyed Indian manufacture by high protective tariffs and other means as it had done before in Ireland. The US adopted free trade a century later for similar reasons.

Consider the poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti which may not be habitable in a few generations; it was probably the richest colony in the world, the source of much of Franc's wealth. By 1789, it was producing 75% of the world's sugar and was the world leader in production of cotton - the oil of the early industrial revolution - as well as other valued commodities. French ships returning from the delivery of slaves brought back Haitian timber. The destruction of the forests by the French rulers, later poverty-driven, caused erosion and further destruction.

Turning to the opposite side of the world, British conquerors were astonished at the wealth, culture and sophisticated civilization of Bengal which they regarded as one of the richest prizes in the world. The conqueror Robert Clove described the great textile center of Dacca now the capital of Bangladesh as 'extensive populous and as rich as the city of London'. After a century of British rule its population had fallen from 150K to 30K and it was reverting to jungle and malaria. Adam smith wrote that hundreds of thousands die in Bengal every year as a result of British regulations that even forced farmers to 'plough up rich fields of rice or other grain for plantations of poppies' for opium production, turning 'dearth into a famine'. Bengal's own fine cotton became extinct and its advanced textile production was transplanted to England.

Haiti and Bangladesh, once the sparkling jewels in the crown of empire are now the very symbols of misery and despair facts that must escape view of 'the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-laced waistcoat'.

[The book covers in detail on different 'free' trade agreement and its actual goal underneath those agreements. He is too much critics about US foreign policy and he is generally concerned about global people as a global citizen's view point.

Following are the main chapters.

Part 1 - Latin America

Year 514: Globalization for whom?]
Latin America and US Foreign Policy
Democracy and Development:Their enemies , their hopes

Latin America and Caribbean Unity

Part II - North America

Good news, Iraq and beyond

Free elections, good news and bad

Century's challenges

Turning Point?

Elections 2008: Hope confronts the real world

Obama on Israel-Palestine

The torture memos

1989 and beyond]